Hi there,
I have a potential project where we're looking at integrating an external search engine. I am still exploring its capabilities but in essence we can send it a search term and then we get rich product data back.
Has anyone done this before and do you have any pointers on how to implement? I think there are a few challenges:
1. One option is to just fetch the product numbers from the external tool and use the standard DW index to display them by posting product numbers to a search page. However, I think that may mess up sorting as documents are sorted by default on the DW score, not on the order I feed the IDs. The benefit would be that other things, like product rendering, live prices and more probably just continue to work.
2. If we take all their data instead and keep iot in their sort order, that means we need to render custom UI for the results and possibly also for facets which adds another layer of complexity. Also, things like stock and prices may have to be reimplemented.
I found this post that seems related to what I am doing: https://doc.dynamicweb.com/forum/development/development/ability-to-set-totalproductcount However, it seems that approach was abandoned because of some issues.
I remember we had an external recommendation engine some years ago. Did that do the same thing and is that source code still available somewhere?
Thanks in advance,
Imar
